In fact, there is
virtually nothing about the facility that pleases the
sheriff, including the way it’s built. “It’s built like a
hotel,” he says. “With large foyers on each floor, a lot of
wasted space with wings to the left and right.” Those wings,
says Tharp, mean that officers cannot have direct
supervision over all the inmates in their care.
So almost immediately
after he came into office, Tharp started beating the drums
for a new facility. He came up with a downtown location in
order to bring it to the Lucas County Commissioners for
their consideration. He and his staff took a look around and
saw what they thought was an ideal location that would be
convenient and would also beautify the large part of
downtown – walking paths connecting courthouses, a pond here
and there.
When the plan made sense,
he took it to the commissioners for their appraisal and they
took a serious look at it, he says. And their serious look
included an estimate of the financial costs. Those costs
analyses placed the possibility of building a new jail
downtown well out of reach, Tharp realized as the downtown
expenses were explained “It was way beyond affordable,” says
Tharp. “Just paying for a parking lot, we would have had to
pay for the lot and then for the owner’s investment of loss
income over the years.”
After dealing with the
financial problems of staying downtown, the sheriff had to
come with grips of the relative inconvenience of relocating
the jail to the far reaches of the city. For his officers,
the convenience of being downtown comes primarily from the
ease of transporting inmates, as they do now, without having
to place them in vehicles. However, if the jail had been
built at his initially preferred location downtown, says
Tharp, his deputies would still have had to transport
inmates via vehicles rather than walking them as they do
now.
“Whether it’s from a
football field away or seven miles, we still have to bus
them,” he notes. “And [in the area away from downtown]
there’s ample parking and room to add on if necessary.”
On the other hand, as he
surveyed the other law enforcement officials – state,
federal, Lucas County – who have to use the jail, he heard
overwhelming support for a new facility and the location
wasn’t much of an issue. Most could see significant
advantage from not having to deal with downtown traffic and
the difficult wait times the old facility presents.
In addition Tharp is very
excited about the Behavioral Health Solution Center, the
facility that will be used to place those individuals who
are impaired due to mental illness or drug abuse and may not
have committed crimes. As a longtime street cop, Tharp
remembers how often he would have to confront someone who
might be mentally impaired and was conflicted with the fact
that he had no other resort than to take him or her to jail.
“Many, many times I would
run into a situation like that,” he recalls. “Now an officer
will have a place to take such an individual.”
A new facility is what the
sheriff has been working toward for all these years.
“I gotta get our people
into a new jail; I gotta get our inmates into a new jail.”
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